This invention relates to the art of collective field charged particle accelerators.
In many fields, including thermonuclear fusion technology and basic particle physics research, there is an acknowledged need for a particle accelerator which is capable of producing an extremely high current, high energy particle beam.
The collective field particle accelerator is one known type of accelerator which does in fact produce a particle beam having a fairly high energy level, although for the applications noted above, the energy levels achieved with conventional collective field accelerators are still not high enough. Numerous suggestions have been made as to how conventional collective field accelerators could be modified to substantially increase their energy levels. Electrostatic lenses and traveling wave structures, which in operation would interact with the ion bunch to increase the acceleration of the ions, are among the concepts which have been suggested, although not actually constructed and tested as of yet. However, the increase in ion energy produced by such devices appears to be rather limited. Other suggested techniques are very speculative and unproven.
Accordingly, it is a general object of the present invention to provide an improved collective field charged particle accelerator which overcomes one or more of the disadvantages of the prior art noted above.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such an accelerator which produces an ion beam having a substantially higher energy level than is achievable with conventional collective field accelerators.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide such an accelerator in which the energy level of the output beam can be substantially increased in successive increments.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide such an accelerator which makes use of conventional collective accelerator apparatus.